


Nobody

by irisesandlilies



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Blood, Idiots in Love, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Song: Nobody (Hozier), everyone say thank you hozier, no plot to speak of? more of an introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:54:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26055280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisesandlilies/pseuds/irisesandlilies
Summary: Bucky nods, trailing his hand along Steve’s open palm and flirting with the suggestion of weaving their fingers. There’s a reverence rounding his gaze and the corners of his mouth. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”Bucky would never fall for someone he thought couldn’t misbehave. And God, how hard Bucky has fallen for Steve.Inspired byNobodyby Hozier
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 2
Kudos: 34





	Nobody

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote a part of this years ago and put it on here but I’ve since orphaned or deleted it. Listening to Nobody on repeat for like the past month sparked an idea and I thought I’d rework it and breathe new life into it!! 
> 
> This is basically just entirely a sappy tribute to this song. 
> 
> Unbeta’d all mistakes are my own
> 
> Content warning for canon typical gore(?) and dealings with trauma

**_I wouldn’t fall for someone I thought couldn’t misbehave_**

Steve has nothing to prove, he sharply reminds Bucky, as the older boy drags him from blood stained dirt. 

He reminds him again as Bucky frets over his face in their cramped bathroom. Bucky draws back slightly, his fist curled around the blood-stained rag. There’s dried blood under his fingernails, Steve’s blood speckled across Bucky’s fingers. The lines of his forehead curl wearily, his lips drawn. Bucky’s face is a book Steve has read repeatedly, dog-eared and underlined, and Steve recognizes the feeling in Bucky’s face as though his own face were contorting to suggest it. It’s knowing, like it’s not enough that he’s wearing Steve on his hands, he can see inside him too. 

There’s no whisper of frustration left to chase in Bucky’s face, just an aching sort of fondness tugging at his lips and in the lines framing his eyes.

Bucky doesn’t ask what provoked Steve’s fists on this occasion, leaving himself to ponder a battle of integrity or a fumble over something daft. Sometimes it was just a misplaced spark that set Steve alight and then he was tasting blood and dirt. Some part of Bucky favored those scuffles, the ones Steve couldn’t explain away with sincere reasoning. It kept Steve from settling atop a pedestal Bucky couldn’t reach. Those kinds of fights remind Bucky that Steve was human. A foolish, zealous, and bright little human, but a human after all. 

“You don’t have to do this.” Steve gestures vaguely towards the cloth, towards the tenderness that has settled in Bucky. 

Bucky laughs, teetering on a scoff that bounces across the tiles and lands back at Steve. The blond tilts his head, narrowing his eyes in expectance, like he’s daring Bucky to let him in on the joke. Steve understands the significance of Bucky’s wry laugh, of course he does, but he wants to hear it aloud. 

Deft, calloused fingers skirt across Steve’s face. Like they always do, because Bucky always seizes the pretense of mending Steve to memorize him. Pet his face, watch him eat, tuck Steve neatly beneath his chin to ward off the cold. [The kisses Bucky presses to Steve’s hair after he’s asleep? That’s just part of it too.] Bucky sets aside the rag, his thumb quietly sweeping across the blooming swell of Steve’s cheek.

“You’re gonna break your goddamn nose again one of these days.” He chides. 

“A pity, cause’ I’m such a sight.” Steve retorts, intending the sarcasm to ebb the genuine self-deprecation.

Bucky had settled his palm on Steve’s knee as he’d doted over his face, his fingers now curling around the distinct point. Bucky taps his fingertips lightly across the seam of Steve’s inner thigh, punctuating the gesture as he wriggles to fit between Steve’s slackening legs. Steve’s slender and bruised hands twitch in his lap, uncertain and longing. He peers down from the edge of the tub, furrowed brow and frowning mouth. Bucky reaches to brush aside Steve’s bangs with a fluidity that he’d acquired from repeating the action, an imprint, muscle memory. 

Conflict storms across Bucky’s face as he fights away an adoring expression with a sad smile, “Like a work of art.” 

He’s too close, fingers having moved to play idly with the cuff of Steve’s sleeve, blotted with blood. It’s nothing akin to an asthmatic episode, but Bucky has studied Steve closely enough to note a similar tightening in his chest. 

“What am I gonna do with you?” Bucky asks softly, one hand tracing the veins glowing blue in Steve’s wrist, the other coming to clasp tenderly around the sharp edges of his hip. 

Steve’s reply is strained, like the words he wants to articulate have resided in his chest too long, they’re fighting brutally to reach his tongue. “Guess you’re stuck with me.”

Bucky nods, trailing his hand along Steve’s open palm and flirting with the suggestion of weaving their fingers. There’s a reverence rounding his gaze and the corners of his mouth. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.” 

_Bucky would never fall for someone he thought couldn’t misbehave. And God, how hard Bucky has fallen for Steve._

Bucky’s fallen for the unwavering righteousness that fills Steve’s chest, leaving no room for breathing. Leaves him sputtering in devotion as he adheres to his values with blood dripping down his face. The courage shaped like spunk, that leads him into battles of altruism and keeps his tongue sharp. Steve might’ve been too good, with his inability to bend the truth and his resolute loyalty. But something keeps him grounded, the swing of his fist keeps him human. The virtuous anger that grips his heart sullies him just enough. Steve misbehaves just enough to remind Bucky that he’s real. Human after all. 

Steve’s real, and flawed, and not a saint, and Bucky’s knelt on their tiled floor begging to know if Steve’s fallen the same way. 

Steve stoops slightly and seals the gap between them, and the crevice within Bucky. It’s messy and uncoordinated just like blond, eager and fervent just like the brunet. 

“I love you.” 

How Bucky loves him in that moment and every single one that follows [even when he can’t remember Steve’s face or his own name]. He tastes all of Steve’s faults and wants them marring his soul too. They do. 

Steve’s flaws were his too, and the sweetly rotten combination was something that could never be wiped away. Machines didn’t have blemishes, and Bucky held on to Steve’s and his own just tightly enough that they couldn’t be pried away. 

**_I’d be appalled if I ever saw you try to be a saint_**

Steve takes a breath, feels the icy air steep in his lungs until he exhales warm and wobbly. 

The sunrise threatens to creep past the lofty tundras, the white snow shaded a pale pink. The pastel sunlight draws towards the gleam of Bucky’s arm, softening the lines. It’s ethereal, Steve watches a trail of blood weave along the plating of his arm, pooling in every juncture. The way blood drips sporadically to burrow into the snow. 

The shell of the spent Hydra base in the distance looks misplaced, contrasted by tinted light and the shadow of Bucky knelt in the slush. 

Steve peers at him, the quiet defeat Bucky’s worn on his shoulders since he’d been drafted burns into Steve’s blood and saturates his heart. Steve’s prying off his gloves, his fingers flexing of their own accord, twitching with want. Bucky’s slow to counter Steve’s lovelorn gaze, the grey of his eyes shine in contrast to the red shade of misery he wears. His face is pleading for the final blow, a wounded animal waiting for death. 

_“I’m sorry.”_ Bucky is holding out his mismatched, bloodstained hands. It’s something so broken and pleading, the weight of the moment is torture for Steve. 

Steve doesn’t know how to rectify their suffering, heal years of punishment for sins that had been misplaced. 

Bucky is searching Steve’s face for any semblance of reassurance, as though Steve could no longer stand to bathe in Bucky’s light, could no longer luxuriate in the gleam off his arm after watching his sleek hand tear the throats from the last of the soldier’s handlers. 

The snow crunches underfoot, giving way to Steve’s shoe prints, a mark to indicate that he and Bucky were real, they were here and they had destroyed the soul of this Hydra base together. 

Just a few measured paces bring Steve to Bucky, like it had been that simple all those years, just a few steps and he was home. Steve’s mouth quirks, tugging upwards as he collapses into a kneel. He’s impervious to the cold threatening the canvas sheathed across his shins, the kevlar bracing his knees. Steve splays out his arms, a gesture to signify the same message he’d worn across his face and in his posture on that helicarrier. He could never attempt to shield any vulnerable part of himself from Bucky, Bucky is Steve’s most vulnerable point. 

“C’mere.” 

There’s a war waging in Bucky’s delicate, abstractly handsome face. Exhaustion and fear. Eventually, he shakes his head slightly, sweeps his right hand across his crimson slick armor. Like Steve wouldn’t proudly wear Hydra’s blood, a symbol of their defeat. 

A wistful smile twists Steve’s face, shines in his eyes, “don’t care.” He doesn’t. 

_Steve would be appalled if Bucky ever tried to be a saint._

Because Steve loved him in peace, and loved him in war, and he still loves him in the aftermath. Never once had Bucky proven himself a saint. If this Bucky tried, Steve would know he was really and truly gone. 

Maybe Steve loved Bucky most in the snapshots of time when he was most unlike a saint, furious beyond words after Steve’s countless attempt at enlistment, berating him that night after the pub [ _this Captain America shit is really the dumbest stunt you’ve pulled yet, Steve_ ], the glint in his eye when he shifted his sniper rifle weightily in his palms. Steve loved Bucky as his skull gave beneath Bucky’s fists, his gut searing with his bullets. And Steve loved Bucky most right in this moment, how unholy, how ruined he was as he painted the snow bloody. 

He drags Bucky’s torso flush against his, to feel his heart beat in morse code. Steve knots his fingers in Bucky’s messy strands, sullied with the grime of battle. Steve tastes Bucky’s breath warm and sweet, their noses nudging. 

“I love you.” Because Bucky deserves to hear it aloud, until Steve’s tongue tires with the words [it never will]. 

Bucky mouth bends into a frown, like it’s prodding a wound for Steve acknowledge his existence, to acknowledge his affections only burn brighter with the uglier Bucky’s actions become. 

Steve draws his palm along Bucky’s arm, smearing the rivets of blood with a reverent smile. A reminder that Bucky’s real, and flawed, and not a saint. And Steve loves him best that way. 

Something flickers in Bucky’s face, something brighter than the sun coming to assert itself over the white dusted mountains. 

Bucky shakes his head, varying from just before, somehow resigned. Mirroring a glimmer of a grin, affectionate with exasperation like when he’d found Steve fighting off men twice his size, years before. 

Bucky murmurs, acquiescence tangled to break his voice, “You really do.” It’s a statement, an acceptance. 

“Always have.” 

It was Bucky’s fingers that set his nose each time it broke, set his heart to rights when that broke too on the bridge in DC. Steve loved him before he could assign meaning to the persistent and ever-present ache, and loved Bucky when there was no light in his eyes to indicate he still loved him back. 

Even if it doesn’t shine like it once had in Bucky’s eyes, he still loves Steve just as much, still clings to their shared flaws in the fist that is still his. 

Now Steve’s knelt beside Bucky instead of perched above him, it’s not his nose bleeding this time, but his heart. Bucky will patch it up all the same. He always does. Steve wants to repay all those favors in any way he can. He knows they’re not keeping score, time slipped and they lost track anyways. They’d always chase each other through time, falling in love with their mistakes, mouthing at each other’s faults forever. 

“Can I?” Steve asks, in the same way he had answered Bucky all those years ago. 

Bucky nods, the quietest gesture that only Steve could learn to read. The way his hair moves with motion, fluttering delicately in the icy wind is the softest thing the solider has done yet. When Bucky tips his face towards Steve’s, the touch of their mouths is even softer. It mimics their first, that last shred of hesitancy before it gives to coppery blood and sweet, long-held affection. Now, they dance on the other side of time, the other side of fear and uncertainty. There’s no coming war to fear, now it sulks behind them as a frame of a building in the arctic instead of an order to report for induction. 

_On the other side, why should they deny the truth?_

**Author's Note:**

> This is what Hozier said of the song: "This is about the limitations of love between flawed people. It's just taking into account how flawed this person is and saying, 'Look, it's the best we have at the moment.’” 
> 
> Anyways, feeling very sappy and I’ll never get tired of trying to capture these two.
> 
> Thanks a ton for reading, let me know what you think or mention other Hozier songs that make you cry over these two.


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